Welcome as always to CANSURVIVING GLOBAL! This is our Spring Newsletter,timed to go out around Valentine's Day, a celebration of love andaffection, which we have for all of you...

We are now accessed in 48 countries, and to date we have 650 members aswell as all those people who come to BROWSE… we get up to to 10K hits amonth...and one new member at the end of 2017 put up three relevant postson his first day as a member—that’s how we grow...

So where to begin? We went to Yes to Life’s annual conference ‘Starting theConversation’ on Saturday 25 November 2017.

Here is the review if you didn’t read it on the site:

“It was a deservedly full to overflowing house for this conference,superbly organised and with the best (vegan, non-gluten) lunch I've evertasted. My own energies meant I only stayed until 2.30, but there will berecordings of the whole event available for £20 on application to Yes toLife. Well worth the money.

After the Founder of Yes to Life's opening address, Sophie Sabbage (authorof The Cancer Whisperer) gave an inspired and galvanising talk 'Caught inthe Crossfire' : As we have said on the site for many years, 'YOUR way isthe Way!'- there is no one way, no one truth- people can walk with you butit is YOUR walk... -there was a reference to the anxiety-promoting seriesThe Truth About Cancer....(and as the poet John Donne said in the 16thcentury 'Truth sits on a high crag'--and those who wish to find her 'Aboutmust and about must go'...JE). I made a lot of notes and am not sure whichperson after that said what...we had Dr Rupy Aujla and his 'Doctor'sKitchen' - he is encouraging GPs to be less 'closed-minded' and look atfood as medicine - (that goes back to Hippocrates of course)..again theemphasis on 'the whole person'. He has also published a recipe book whichwas recently bought for Rosie - look out for some recipes in thesummer/autumn newsletter...

Dr Malcolm Kendrick was splendidly rebarbative and talked of 'taking on TheBeast' in his talk about 'the patient battle'...well while oncansurviving.com we ask people not to fight, and are not fans of battlelanguage, there are some things worth fighting for...not disturbing 'thestatus quo' may have very difficult consequences for many people.--I thinkit was he who mentioned Schopenhauer whose words I have above my desk: 'AllTruth passes through three stages: First it is ridiculed, second it isviolently opposed, Third it is accepted as being self-evident'...) Heshowed some really good images including one of Yoda talking aboutFEAR...which as Dr K pointed out 'may be disguised as caution'.

Professor Robert Thomas is an oncologist (an oncologist, yes!) discussinglifestyle after cancer: he was going off in the afternoon to discuss thistopic at the Marsden among other places- what good news is that. He hadlots of research links which will be available on the recording.

Then to round off the morning there was a recorded interview where RobinDaly the Founder of Yes to Life and Dr Rangan Chatterjee the BBC 'Doctor inthe House' talked about widening the brief for GPs. Dr Chatterjee gave avery good example of two ways to approach for instance diabetes andobesity...same patient, same GP, different approach and differentlanguage...start with how to eat, not how to open your mouth and takeanother drug... Though he wasn't there, he and Robin got a well-deservedround of applause!

There was more, much more, which I sadly had to miss- but I and my husbandAndrew Baldwin who is the 'Ideas Man' on the cansurviving site (as well asmy carer when necessary) met a lot of people in the refreshment and lunchbreaks.... So many thanks to Robin and his Yes to Life team. We hope to bethere again next year and join the growing group of 'patients' who get backinto the driving seat and become 'people' again...”

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Earlier in the year Judith and Robin had had a conversation about the siteon UK Health Radio …(see the site for details).

Shirley Bianca whose Message of Hope is on the Creativity Forum got intouch with us again and linked us with Bloom...a boon for breast cancersurvivors and carers:. Bloom is a collection of articles from groups andorganizations around the world who are involved in breast cancer support,research, and advocacy. They welcome submissions of articles related to thecurrent theme or to other topics that may be of interest to Bloom’sinternational readership. The e-newsletter allows women who have livedthrough breast cancer to tell their stories and share their emotional andpsychological experiences. It reports on how groups organize programs todevelop breast cancer awareness in their communities and give support tocancer patients. We are as we all know huge fans of group endeavours, andgood to know about this one, based in Germany.

Then we started 2018 off in fine form with three new posts in the firstweek- one about Cancer and Fear in the research section by Liz Butler, along-time member, then a Happy Cow app on the restaurants section- neverfeel anxious about food all over the world ever again! And vegans are nowmainstream it seems as another post on Diet and the Body explains...well itmay be a ‘fad’ who knows, but for those of us who are vegan by choicerather than fad this can be nothing but good news…

Hard on the heels of this we posted something in the ‘Will you or Won’tYou’ forum called Hallo Elephant….we’re so privileged to have Josefine whostarted the Natural Death Centre as a member of our site…

We have a Facebook page and someone else on his own page advertising whathe sells wrote ‘why would you give people things for free?’ Well we havedecided that this will indeed continue to be our way forward, our ‘one stopfree shop’ which will exist as long as there is need, for people to browseand come back again and again- in terms of the above-mentioned elephant,the Site Founder has put a provision in her will to carry on paying thefees so that the site can continue if the need continues- one day perhapswe hope it will not.....but another internet search reveals 6 ½ millionsites right now for healing cancer…if we can carry on helping people withthe ‘darkness inside’ then that’s good enough for us...as the Russian poetBrodsky said: ‘I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out/Whichis worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out’.

Now personal news

Our mascot vegan baby Finn (the Mighty) is now five months old, healthy andsmiling, of course the apple of his vegan parents’ eyes and all our eyes.As Rosie says: “I'm a boasting mother of course but this is all for thevegan cause - he's on the 95th percentile for his weight and 99th for hislength!”

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Rosie graduated as an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach at the end ofJanuary, making her a qualified health coach. Health coaches work withclients to guide them to make better dietary and lifestyle choices - thekey here is prevention of chronic illness and optimisation of personalhealth and happiness. Watch this space for more news as Rosie uses thisqualification to grow her own business. You can read more here about whathealth coaches do - https://www.ukhealthcoachesassociation.co.uk/about/.And here is more info about the school who Rosie studied with -https://www.integrativenutrition.com/about-us.

Lorraine (who taught some of the children who so sadly ended their shortlives on June 14th 2017 in the Grenfell fire in West London where some ofus also live) is still teaching in her ‘spare time’ as well as doing ademanding day job, and promoting the site wherever she goes. Hot news isthat she is moving to Manchester with her partner in April, and will bedoing more teaching possibly at the University… we’ll miss her hugely buthey there’s always WhatsApp with its brilliant video function…

The Site Founder and the Ideas Man continue to get invitations from allover the world (yes!) to go to conferences and to write papers, but we feelthat the internet is the way forward now: while we could indeed make evenmore links by travelling more, there’s an end to what we can manage as wellas achieve…

And finally last but definitely not least our indefatigable ScotlandRepresentative Patricia continues to promote what we do – a recent messagefrom her says that even Harvey Nicholls in Edinburgh now have a veganrestaurant! Absolutely fabulous, darlings….(https://www.veganlifemag.com/harvey-nic ... staurants/)

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Well our final thought in this Newsletter for all our members and otherswho browse the site: there IS no ‘One Way’--- you can find what’s good foryou and that in itself it super-empowering...as the book ‘Cancer is not aDisease, It’s a Survival Mechanism’ says “Since the body’s original geneticdesign always favours the continuance of life and protection againstadversities of any kind, why would the body permit self-destruction?..Cancer is on our side, not against us”. If we commission ourselves totake care of ourselves, authorise ourselves to take charge, then we can getback into the driving seat and roll on….